PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Going Everywhere, at Home Nowhere but Within Himself

In 1940, Gordon Parks, the son of a dirt farmer in Fort Scott, Kan., who made his living playing piano in a brothel, washing dishes in a restaurant and waiting on tables on a transcontinental train, found himself broke in Minnesota. So he did what any poor black man trying to support his wife and kids would do: He went to an exclusive clothing store in St. Paul and told the owner that he would like to take fashion photographs. Amazingly, the store gave him a chance. He borrowed lights and a camera, muddled through a roll of double exposures and got one good picture, the shot that started his illustrious and improbable career in photography.

''Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks,'' a 221-picture retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and now on view at the Museum of the City of New York, covers the nearly 60 years of photography that followed that shot: from Harlem street fights to Paris fashions, from Rio slums to artists' studios, from Kansas pool halls to Mr. Parks's flowery imaginings. If this is only half past autumn, you have to wonder what winter could possibly bring. And this, bear in mind, is only one of Mr. Parks's careers. He is also an author, filmmaker, poet and composer.

The first bend in his photographic life occurred when the boxer Joe Louis's wife, Marva, happened to visit the store in St. Paul, where Mr. Parks's fashion photographs were on display. She was so impressed that she invited him to Chicago to do more. What quality did she see in his work? One of Mr. Parks's portraits in the retrospective, a picture of a gloved, veiled, glamorous Marva, accompanied by her billowing, glamorous shadow on the wall, is a clue. He had an eye for elegance.

Mr. Parks went to Chicago, but he had other things on his mind than fashion. After all, his first photographic inspiration had not been fashion plates but pictures of poor workers taken by the Farm Security Administration. Mr. Parks turned his camera to the slums on the South Side. For the work he did there, he won a fellowship, and he chose to spend it at the Farm Security Administration in Washington, under Roy Stryker.

It was there, in 1942, that Mr. Parks took the iconic picture of his career: a portrait of a black charwoman posing under an American flag with a broom in one hand and a mop in the other. Her name was Ella Watson and she cleaned the floors at the Farm Security Administration.

A pleasure of this large retrospective is to see this powerfully polemical portrait, ''American Gothic,'' joined with lesser-known shots of the same woman. One shows Mrs. Watson dressed up and waiting patiently in line, barefoot, with other black women. Another picture, split neatly in half by the door frame of a kitchen, seems to show the past and future of Ella Watson. In the left half of the picture, she sits in the kitchen with her grandchildren around her. In the right half is a younger woman reflected in a dresser mirror. On the dresser next to the mirror is an old photograph of a man and woman who appear to be Mrs. Watson's parents.

This complex, dense, socially loaded photograph is typical of some of Mr. Parks's best works. A picture titled ''Negro Children in the Front Door of Their Home,'' for example, is a marvel of formal order created out of the disorder of poverty. In the narrow space behind a screen door, a row of kids are lined up, one behind the other, according to height, and they don't appear to be posing. In the back is a tall boy on tiptoe and in the front is a little girl in pigtails, hanging out of the bottom of the screenless door. All of them are looking at something intriguing or terrible or both that is out of the camera's view.

When the Farm Security Administration was disbanded in 1943, Stryker took Mr. Parks with him to the Office of War Information and then to the Standard Oil Photography Project, which was devoted to producing patriotic images of the United States during the war. Mr. Parks traveled to New York, Maine, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and he appeared to be an outsider everywhere.

In Harlem he shot a sea of children peering at him through a half-open car window. In New England he caught a fisherman, lighting his pipe under a storm lantern and looking suspiciously out at him. These two pictures show Mr. Parks's peculiar position. In Harlem, he was the object of envy. In New England he was an intruder.

You have to admire Mr. Parks's fortitude as a constant outsider. A picture of three teen-age cowhands in front of a restaurant with the accidentally fitting name Bar U in Turner Valley, Alberta, show some good ol' boys with hats, missing teeth and smirky smiles. What could they have been thinking? A portrait of four generations of New England women, zigzagging back through a room, from an old spotted face in front to a baby on its mother's lap in back, shows a closed if crooked maternal line. How did they welcome him to their home?

Throughout his career, Mr. Parks swerved back and forth between whiteness and blackness, fashion and poverty, as if he were using each of these worlds as a warning, a lure and a lesson for himself.

One year he photographed a teen-age gang leader in Harlem looking into the satin-lined coffin of a man killed in a rumble. The next year he was in Paris catching a fashionable lady in a veiled hat sucking hard on a cigarette and squinting from the smoke in her eyes. One year he took pictures of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini at the beginning of their love affair in Stromboli, Italy. The next he photographed beggars in the streets of Portugal.

Diving into so many worlds, Mr. Parks must have wondered where his true home was. In 1949, he returned to Fort Scott, where he was born in 1912, to find out. The pictures he took there, though, are hardly pictures of a native son returning home. A picture of Mr. Parks's uncle leaning on a cane shows no sign of familial recognition. A picture of men standing for a portrait outside a pool hall seems to be summed up by the dog's expression: What are you doing here?

He did not linger in Fort Scott. Starting in the late 1940's, Mr. Parks, the first black photographer at Life magazine, produced a series of photo essays: on poverty, segregation, black Muslims, the Black Panthers, crime and fashion. By far the best known of Mr. Parks's photo essays, and the one given the most space in this exhibition, is the 1961 series of pictures he took of a poor, asthmatic boy named Flavio da Silva living in a slum in Rio de Janeiro. In one photograph Flavio lies in bed, looking deathly ill. In another he sits behind his baby brother, Zacarias, stuffing food into the baby's mouth from behind while the baby reaches into the dish for more food with his wet, dirty hands.

The fact that Mr. Parks crisscrossed so many classes and cultures makes for some strange resonances in the retrospective. The picture that Mr. Parks took of a sea of hats and coats on the Staten Island ferry in 1944 seems formally similar to the sea of faces at a black Muslim rally in 1963. The picture of Flavio stuffing the baby's mouth from behind looks oddly similar to two preachers with their hands over the mouth of a woman they are baptizing.

Given Mr. Parks's habit of swinging between Vanderbilts and gang leaders, it is no surprise that the exhibition is somewhat choppy, moving from one photo essay to another. It is also no surprise that there is a large gap in the retrospective that runs from the late 1970's until the 90's. Those were the years Mr. Parks was writing most of his books, composing a ballet based on the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1989), and directing a series of films: ''The Learning Tree,'' a movie based on his first book (1969); ''Shaft'' (1971), which will be shown free in Bryant Park on Thursday at 8:30 P.M., and ''Moments Without Proper Names'' (1986), an autobiographical film, which will be shown continuously at the museum.

This retrospective does raise the question of where Mr. Parks feels most at home. The last part of the show, focusing on Mr. Parks's abstract color landscapes, seems to give a partial answer. For the last few years, he has been creating dreamy, flowery, abstractions in his studio by using shells, flowers, cloth and other props. These works, which are reminiscent of some of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings, have suggestive, romantic titles like ''Toward Infinity,'' ''Moondown'' and ''The Labyrinth.'' It is almost as if Mr. Parks realized how much his eyes had seen in eight decades and decided to create a home for himself in his imagination.

''Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks,'' sponsored by Ford Motor and Time Warner, is on view at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, at 103d Street, until Nov. 1.